Vulnerability and event: Phenomenology of exposure, wounding, and meaning

Abstract

This article develops a phenomenology of vulnerability as an ontological structure of human existence, understood not merely as empirical fragility, but as a radical openness to the event that breaks in, destabilizes, and reconfigures the subject’s horizon of meaning. The following text argues that that vulnerability is not a deficiency to be overcome, but a constitutive disposition of the self: an originary passibility that allows one to be affected by the other, by the unexpected, and by the excess of meaning. Through an analysis of the event as an experience of rupture –both foundational and potentially devastating– it shows how this unguarded exposure constitutes the very condition of possibility for any subjective transformation and for any donation of meaning. Far from being reducible to weakness, vulnerability thus appears as the very core of an existence capable of being reborn in the heart of its own crises.